Codes worked fine one week ago, but keep getting error since yesterday: Fine-tuning Bert model training via PyTorch on Colab

Question

I am new to Bert. Two weeks ago I successfully ran a fine-tuning Bert model on a nlp classification task though the outcome was not brilliant. Yesterday, however, when I tried to run the same code and data, an AttributeError was always there, which says: 'str' object has no attribute 'dim'. Please know everything is on Colab and via PyTorch Transformers. What should I do to fix it?

Here is one thing I tried when I installed transformers but turned out it did not work: instead of !pip install transformers , I tried to use previous transformers version: !pip install --target lib --upgrade transformers==3.5.0

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!

Please see the code and the error message as below:

Code:

1. train definition

# function to train the model
def train():
  
  model.train()

  total_loss, total_accuracy = 0, 0
  
  # empty list to save model predictions
  total_preds=[]
  
  # iterate over batches
  for step,batch in enumerate(train_dataloader):
    
    # progress update after every 50 batches.
    if step % 200 == 0 and not step == 0:
      print('  Batch {:>5,}  of  {:>5,}.'.format(step, len(train_dataloader)))

    # push the batch to gpu
    batch = [r.to(device) for r in batch]
 
    sent_id, mask, labels = batch

    # clear previously calculated gradients 
    model.zero_grad()        

    # get model predictions for the current batch
    preds = model(sent_id, mask)

    # compute the loss between actual and predicted values
    loss = cross_entropy(preds, labels)

    # add on to the total loss
    total_loss = total_loss + loss.item()

    # backward pass to calculate the gradients
    loss.backward()

    # clip the the gradients to 1.0. It helps in preventing the exploding gradient problem
    torch.nn.utils.clip_grad_norm_(model.parameters(), 1.0)

    # update parameters
    optimizer.step()

    # update learning rate schedule
    # scheduler.step()  

    # model predictions are stored on GPU. So, push it to CPU
    preds=preds.detach().cpu().numpy()

    # append the model predictions
    total_preds.append(preds)

  # compute the training loss of the epoch
  avg_loss = total_loss / len(train_dataloader)
  
  # predictions are in the form of (no. of batches, size of batch, no. of classes).
  # reshape the predictions in form of (number of samples, no. of classes)
  total_preds  = np.concatenate(total_preds, axis=0)

  #returns the loss and predictions
  return avg_loss, total_preds

2. training process

# set initial loss to infinite
best_valid_loss = float('inf')

# empty lists to store training and validation loss of each epoch
train_losses=[]
valid_losses=[]

#for each epoch
for epoch in range(epochs):
     
    print('\n Epoch {:} / {:}'.format(epoch + 1, epochs))
    
    #train model
    train_loss, _ = train()
    
    #evaluate model
    valid_loss, _ = evaluate()
    
    #save the best model
    if valid_loss < best_valid_loss:
        best_valid_loss = valid_loss
        torch.save(model.state_dict(), 'saved_weights.pt')
    
    # append training and validation loss
    train_losses.append(train_loss)
    valid_losses.append(valid_loss)
    
    print(f'\nTraining Loss: {train_loss:.3f}')
    print(f'Validation Loss: {valid_loss:.3f}')

3. Error message:

 Epoch 1 / 10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-41-c5138ddf6b25> in <module>()
     12 
     13     #train model
---> 14     train_loss, _ = train()
     15 
     16     #evaluate model

5 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/torch/nn/functional.py in linear(input, weight, bias)
   1686         if any([type(t) is not Tensor for t in tens_ops]) and has_torch_function(tens_ops):
   1687             return handle_torch_function(linear, tens_ops, input, weight, bias=bias)
-> 1688     if input.dim() == 2 and bias is not None:
   1689         # fused op is marginally faster
   1690         ret = torch.addmm(bias, input, weight.t())

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'dim'

Answer 1

As far as I remember - there was an old transformer version in colab. Something like 2.11.0. Try:

!pip install transformers~=2.11.0

Change the version number until it works.